Park Chung Hee's rule fuelled Korea's economic miracle and a bitter dictatorship
South Korea's rapid rise, known as the Miracle on the Han River, took off under a general who seized power in a 1961 coup. Park Chung Hee fostered giants like Samsung and Hyundai, then crushed dissent under martial law, until his own intelligence chief shot him dead in 1979.
Park was born on 14 November 1917 in Sangmo-dong, Gumi, when Korea was part of the Empire of Japan, the youngest of seven children of a desperately poor family. His father, by Park's account from a yangban background, had been cast out by his clan for joining the Tonghak Peasant Revolution of 1894 to 1895 and later drank and drifted rather than farm. His mother, about 43 at his birth, ran both household and fields.
As the army's second-highest officer, Park led the May 16 coup of 1961, ending the interim Second Republic. After two years heading the junta he was elected president in 1963, opening the Third Republic. Staunchly anti-communist, he kept close ties with the United States and sent South Korean troops to Vietnam. His economic programme drove some of the fastest growth of the 1960s and 1970s, at a cost to labour rights, and nurtured chaebols, state-backed family conglomerates similar to Japan's zaibatsu, such as LG.
By the early 1970s his support was slipping, shown by narrow wins in the 1971 elections. In 1972 he staged a self-coup, declared martial law and imposed the authoritarian Yushin Constitution, founding the Fourth Republic and ruling as a dictator who controlled the army, media and even the arts. In 1979, after the Busan–Masan Uprising, Kim Jae-gyu, a close friend who ran the KCIA, shot him dead; whether the killing was planned remains unclear. Choi Kyu-hah succeeded him but was soon ousted by Chun Doo-hwan, and full democratisation came only with the June Democratic Struggle of 1987.
Koreans remain divided. Some credit him with modernising the nation; others condemn his trampling of civil liberties and human rights. In October 2021 a Gallup Korea survey ranked him among the most positively remembered presidents, alongside Kim Dae-jung, an opponent Park once tried to have executed, and Roh Moo-hyun. His daughter Park Geun Hye became president in 2013 and was impeached in 2017.
Source: Park Chung Hee
